Ever since graduates of the School of the Americas were linked to the
assassinations of six Salvadoran Jesuit priests in 1989, peace activists have
worked tirelessly to shut down the military school at Fort Benning, Ga.
Opponents of the school have organized protests at the fort and the Pentagon,
publicized atrocities committed by hundreds of its graduates, lobbied Congress
and ultimately brought about a historic vote to cut its funding, only to see
the school close and reopen under a new name.

This year, Maryknoll Fr. Roy Bourgeois, founder of the movement SOA
Watch that opposes the School of the Americas, is trying a new strategy:
appealing directly to Latin American leaders to stop sending their officers to
the school, which in 2001 was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for
Security Cooperation, or WHISC.

So far, the priest is batting a thousand. After Bourgeois made an appeal
on Venezuelan national television and met with President Hugo Chávez,
the government announced it will no longer send its officers to the school.

Whats more, Bourgeois organization has obtained, after a
three-year battle, the names of WHISC graduates and has already linked several
to corruption and human rights abuses -- including a Salvadoran officer
involved in a massacre of 16 people, a Bolivian officer responsible for the
torture of a human rights leader, and three Colombians implicated in a
corruption scheme involving counter-narcotics funds.

In interviews with NCR, Army and school officials downplayed the
fact that the institution is losing Venezuela, an oil-rich country and one of
the schools bigger clients with more than 4,000 graduates.

Venezuela cant send any more officers, and Venezuelans
now in training will be gone before summer, said Army Lt. Col. Linda Gould.
Venezuela, she said, is a member of the International Criminal Court and has
not signed an Article 98 waiver that the State Department now demands before
approving foreign military assistance, sales and training.

The waiver is aimed at exempting U.S. officials and military personnel
from prosecution by the court for war crimes. By signing it, Venezuela would
agree to disavow its international obligation to extradite accused U.S.
soldiers and officials to The Hague for trial.

Venezuelas announcement about ending the training came six weeks
after Bourgeois met with Chávez during a weeklong trip to the country
organized by Maryknolls Office for Global Concerns and the Medical
Mission Sisters Alliance for Justice.

Global Concerns director Marie Dennis said the January visit was
organized to meet with a broad spectrum of people, including U.S. embassy and
Venezuelan government officials, barrio residents, religious leaders and
Chávez critics, some of whom, Dennis said, the government will need to
engage if it is to succeed in redirecting the countrys resources to meet
the needs of the poor.

Bourgeois was particularly impress-ed with the governments health
and literacy programs for the poor, who make up nearly 80 percent of the
population: I saw a lot of hope and joy in the barrios.

The Bush administration is trying to paint Chávez as
something of a dictator, Bourgeois said. But they have freedom of
the press. There were opposition papers everywhere, and Chávez gets a
lot of bad press. They have the freedom to protest. There are large
demonstrations all the time. And there are no political prisoners -- a
fact that even Stephen McFarland, a top U.S. embassy official, conceded to the
delegation.

Bourgeois had gone to Venezuela in the hopes of talking to Chávez
about the School of the Americas, but the meeting could not be prearranged and
happened by chance. Bourgeois had broached the subject during a visit with the
countrys vice president, José Vicente Rangel.

Immediately after that meeting, Dennis said, Venezuelan media filmed
interviews with some members of the delegation, and Bourgeois mentioned the
schools track record. Minutes later, the cell phone of Lisa Sullivan, a
Maryknoll lay missionary who had set up meetings for the group, started
ringing. It was the vice president, Dennis said.

Chávez, he said, had seen them on television and wanted the group
to join him for his weekly live television broadcast, during which he takes
calls from the public and talks about a wide range of topics, including current
events, unemployment, the economy and the plight of the poor.

During the live broadcast, Bourgeois made an appeal that the military
stop sending its officers to a school linked to torture and terrorism, a school
whose graduates have overthrown democratic governments, organized death squads
and carried out the assassinations of the six Jesuits, Archbishop Oscar Romero
and four U.S. churchwomen in El Salvador, he said.

Venezuelan newspapers quoted Chávez the next day as saying the
school deformed the minds of many Latin American soldiers.

But Bourgeois heard nothing more until Feb. 26, when Rangel, the vice
president, made an address to the National Assembly and announced that all
training of Venezuelan soldiers at the U.S. school would cease, adding that the
United States, which considers itself a democracy, shouldnt have an
institution like this on its soil.

School spokesman Lee Rials said three Venezuelan SOA graduates helped
restore Chávez to power after the coup, but he did not know their
names.

Venezuela, he said, isnt the only Latin American nation that has
not signed an Article 98 waiver, although he didnt know which ones had
not. The school at Fort Benning is not the only U.S. military institution
affected, he said; no U.S. military facility can train members of foreign
militaries whose governments have not signed the waiver. In 2003, the United
States trained the militaries of more than 150 countries.

Bourgeois hopes other Latin nations will follow Venezuelas lead in
ending training at the school, whether Article 98 waivers are an issue or not.
The Venezuelan action has energized the movement to close the school, along
with the new revelations about WHISC graduates, said Eric LeCompte, SOA
Watchs coordinator of organizing. The revelations, he said, are just now
surfacing because it has taken SOA Watch three years to obtain the full names
of the graduates.

Weve had horrendous problems getting information from the
school, said SOA Watchs legislative coordinator, Jacqueline Baker.
In the past, the school refused to respond to requests and then released
incomplete names making impossible any definitive links to abuses, she
said.

Officials, she said, claimed they didnt have the
information, which, if true, means they didnt even know who was attending
their own institution.

So far, researchers have linked several recent graduates to corruption
and abuse, Baker said, including:

Salvadoran Col. Francisco del Cid Díaz, a 2003 graduate, who
was cited by the 1993 U.N. Truth Commission for commanding a unit that dragged
16 people from their homes and shot them at point-blank range.

Bolivian Maj. Filmann Urzagaste Rodríguez, a 2002 graduate,
who was implicated in the 1997 torture of lawyer Waldo Albarracín, then
the director of the Popular Assembly for Human Rights.

Three Colombian police officers under investigation for the personal
use of counter-narcotics funds who took courses in 2002 and 2003: Capt. Dario
Sierro Chapeta, Lt. Col. Francisco Patino Fonseca and Capt. Luis Benavides
Guancha.

These cases, LeCompte said, call into question the schools claims
of openness, screening and accountability. The school is anything but
transparent, he said. It has made it as difficult as possible to get even
the most basic information.

When SOA reopened in January 2001 as the Western Hemisphere Institute
for Security Cooperation, it claimed to be a new school with a new mission,
devoted to promoting human rights and democracy.

But even before the schools use of manuals advocating torture and
assassination came to light in 1996, an Army Training and Doctrine Command
study suggested that it change its name to bury the past, LeCompte said.

The 1995 study said, Concerns about the school in the post-Cold
War period have surfaced, driven in part by adverse publicity over human rights
violations associated with past students of the school.

It concluded that negative publicity about the school would
probably continue and that a new name for the school may be an appropriate way
to break with the past.

The schools aversion to releasing names and its enrollment of
officers linked to human rights abuses show that it has broken with the past in
name only, Baker said: The del Cid Díaz case seriously undermines
the ability of WHISC to claim that they are teaching human rights. It sends a
message that our government is rewarding well-known human rights
abusers.

James Hodge and Linda Cooper are freelance writers from New Orleans.
They are the authors of Disturbing the Peace: The Story of Fr. Roy Bourgeois
and the Movement to Close the School of the Americas, to be published by Orbis
next fall.